A Lexical Approach to Italian Cliticization

Paola Monachesi

This volume examines the behavior of clitics both in Italian and in certain southern Italian dialects in order to show that, even within a single language, clitics exhibit different properties. Monachesi argues against the existence of a special class ‘clitics’ whose elements exhibit variable behavior. Instead, she decomposes and assimilates their properties to those of well established categories. Motivations are thus provided for treating Italian object clitics as affixes. It is shown that both their morphosyntactic and their phonological behavior argue in favor of this assumption. Under this view, a lexicalist analysis is proposed which takes into account the phonological, morphological and syntactic properties of Italian clitics.

Paola Monachesi is a researcher at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) located at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.